I remember one time in my career, when I found myself sitting in the office of a development manager at my company.  He was super-smart, and leading a team of great talent, but he had a blind spot around design.  I was trying to convince him that he needed to let some UX designers get involved in his project early, and he wasn’t having it.  The developers were already making key decisions about how the software would work, and usability testing of the prototype had shown major problems.

“I don’t want to waste their time,” he told me.  “Right now we’re still figuring out the hard stuff.  We can bring the designers in later to make it all pretty.”

And there it was.  He was making what seemed to him to be a wise decision because of a false belief: that the role of UX designers was to make things pretty (ignoring about 98% of the value that a competent designer brings to a software development team).  This belief, unfortunately, was widespread on that team, and as a result they frequently created very powerful, but largely unusable features for their software.

Culture can be defined as the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.  The story above is one example of a cultural attitude or belief that negatively impacts the quality of team decision-making.  Over the years I’ve seen attitudes about whose opinion matters play out in many different ways in the teams and companies I’ve worked with.

These beliefs can run both ways, with the opinions of some groups elevated and others disregarded.  In different situations I’ve heard all of the following:

“Sales should call the shots because they are the only ones bringing in the money”

“The sales team is full of ex-jocks that don’t understand our tech at all”

“Developers must be really smart people to understand all that tech so they should make the final call”

“Developers don’t have a clue what our customers want so they should just build what marketing tells them”

“Designers just make things pretty”

“Designers are the only people with a deep understanding of the customer”

I’ve also seen some groups (like documentation, or front-line support staff) get ignored completely, expected to clean up whatever problems were left by bad design and engineering decisions.

You’ve probably heard of a HiPPO decision, where the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion is the only one that matters, even when that person is the least informed on the issues.  That particular cultural belief comes with a dangerous corollary -- that low-paid people have nothing valuable to contribute to decision-making.  And then, of course, there is the all-too-common marginalization of the voices of people based on their gender, sexuality, ethnicity, size, (dis)ability, etc.

Cultural beliefs like these – that certain voice should override others, or that some voices are just not important – negatively impact the ability of an organization to make good decisions.  And yet they are common:  I recently did an informal poll on my various social media asking people on product development teams: “Between Designers, Product Managers, and Developers, were all voices considered, or did certain voices have outsized influence?”  (I would have liked to include more categories, but the polling features only allowed 4 options).   Overall only 11% reported that their team valued these different perspectives equally – the rest were pretty evenly split between saying that Developers and PMs had the outsize influence.  Only one person reported working on a team where Design had the biggest voice.

The point of group decision-making isn’t for one voice or another to “win” – the point is to uncover, share, and synthesize all the relevant information so that the best possible decision can be made.  The best decision is often a position that no one came into the room with, but that has deeper nuance and lower risk.  As the saying goes:  All of us are smarter than any of us.

There are three big success factors for good group decision-making:

1.   The decision-making team needs to contain diverse perspectives.  If everyone on the decision-making team has the same perspective, they can miss critical insight.  This was called out recently in the Southwest Airlines debacle, when senior managers (all accountants) did not appreciate the importance of operational issues that they had been warned of for years.

2.   Team members need to respect that the contributions of others are valuable.  It doesn’t help to have multiple perspectives in the room when the perspectives of some people are systematically disregarded.  One respondent to my survey shared a story of her product team, where one developer continually disregarded UX research and design because in a previous job he had worked as a customer, and “knew what users wanted”.  “Unfortunately”, my respondent said, “we ended up with something that only he understood.  It left out a large group of our customers [who worked differently, as we knew from our research]”

3.   Decision-making meetings need to be facilitated to draw out and synthesize different perspectives.  This is the goal of a decision-making team – to uncover all the relevant perpectives, share them out, and synthesize a decision from it.  If the decision is of any importance, this process can sometimes be difficult and uncomfortable.  It’s not easy to be the only person in the meeting with a contrary opinion, especially if it rains on your boss’ bright new idea.  Mutual respect, skilled facilitation and a culture of psychological safety are key to the good-faith engagement required for the best decisions.  (Here’s some interesting research about how diverse but balanced editing teams create better Wikipedia entries.)

Cultural beliefs around whose voice matters impact all three of these success factors – who gets invited to participate in decision-making, whose contributions are taken into account, and the overall psychological safety of the decision-making team.  And aside from negative impact on decision-making, regularly discounting the opinions of employees can lead to disengagement and burnout.  Even when people disagree with you, feeling that you are at least understood and your work is appreciated is a predictor of wellbeing.)

Omitting (or discounting) key perspectives during product team decision-making leads to predictable preventable failures:

Teams that don’t value design and content opinion can create software that demos well, but that is error-prone (due to inconsistency), too hard to learn or use, or that doesn’t solve the user’s problem in a useful way.  

Teams that don't value product management opinion  can squander resources building things that won’t help move the business forward with its strategic objectives, or that won’t create competitive separation, or that people just don’t want to buy.

Teams that don't value developer opinion can end up with a precarious, fragile code-base with features tacked on all over and no firm foundation.  The cost of this grows and grows over time as the codebase becomes more and more brittle.

Teams that don’t value customer-facing staff opinion (sales, support) can miss key opportunities for improvement and risk to customer retention and competition.

If you have a HiPPO at the top, a boss who imagines that they are smarter than all their staff, you can end up with all of the above happening simultaneously.

Of course, the more people involved in decision-making, the longer it will take complete.  So you always need to make trade-offs between decision quality and time.  If you look at the cost of implementing decision, the number of people impacted, the risk of getting it wrong, and the cost to change the decision if you are wrong, that should give you some idea of how much you want to invest in ensuring that the decision is as good as possible.

So how do you overcome these unhealthy cultural beliefs?  The best way is to get people in different roles to work collaboratively on common goals.  By working together, people can see what others are doing, learn to respect each other’s contributions, and build the trust they need for faster multi-perspective decision-making.  This is one of the reasons for the rise of cross-functional teams in product development – single, closely-working teams that comprise people of different backgrounds and skills can both accelerate and improve the quality of decision-making.

Rory Madden, co-creator of the UXDX conference (which pulls together developers, designers, and product managers and promotes cross-functional teams), said “I wanted to have all these different people in the same room so they can’t just blame each other for what goes wrong.”

Another good practice for leaders when important decisions are coming up, is to have explicit conversations about the decision-making process – who should own the decision?  What relevant perspectives need to be represented in the room?  Who has the right skills to facilitate?  Should it be someone on the team or should we get someone from outside?  Set expectations that decision-making should always be done thoughtfully.  If you show that you as a leader respect diverse opinions and good process, then that will shift the culture on your team.  You may never stop the occasional trash-talking, but at least your teams will be making better decisions.

More from John  (or follow his RSS Feed )

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Why don't people participate in meetings?    or, Why can't I get a word in edgewise?

Holding a Mirror to Corporate Values - Figuring out what the actual core values of your company are

Micromanagement and Psychological Safety - How a toxic management style impacts team health

The Authentic Team - The problem with bringing your whole self to work